Category Archives: context-ual

Where I’ve been

07 Friday Sep 2018

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The super obnoxious thing about depression is that most of the time it looks like nothing more than laziness. Just laying about being useless. But while that’s happening connections to friends are being severed, maintenance of good habits withers and disappear, and responsibilities start to be ignored. And because the depressed person is internally thrashing around trying to find something that feels good again, they’ll probably take up some bad habits (eating junk food, shit sleep schedules, drinking, drugs, etc) because at least they offer a spark when everything else is dull and uninteresting.

People promise they’ll be there when you need help. But depression is a chronic problem, and when it’s really bad, really dark, it’s already gotten past the point of “cut off connection to anything requiring leaving the house” and past the point of “made snarky or angry remarks that pushed people away” and past the point of “ignored paperwork needed to get back to therapy or renew medication.”

If depression were cancer, the point someone could help would be Stage 2, when we’re just kind of obnoxious. But maybe, if you’re patient and persistent, you can convince us to take a shower and step out of the house for an hour. If you think you’re going to help when we’re suicidal: You won’t. That’s stage 4 and we’ll never tell you about it.

When you have depression, even mild depression, at best you’re at Stage 1 all of your life. Kinda submerged, but getting by. Mostly everything is good really. Life is very handle-able here, but the pain in the ass is when we’re supposed to be happy and we just can’t be. All we can do is nod and say, “Yes, that accomplishment I’ve been shooting for for years has finally come about, and it is good.” It’s hard to feel happy about it, but we do know it’s supposed to be happy making. And we may also know (this comes with some experience) not to expound on how we feel weird and conflicted about it because someone will try to helpfully inform us that we should be happy – something we already know – which will make us just feel worse. So we’ve learned to slap a smile on and say thank you to praise even if we don’t feel grateful or elevated by it. Yeah, intellectually, I can grasp a lot of things. I worked hard for this and I *should* be proud. I *should* be happy. I *should* be grateful. I *should* be eager for the next thing. I *should* be driven to do the things I say I like doing. But I’m not.

Some people can get right to work on the things they don’t like doing just to get them out of the way. Some people can go ahead and do things they aren’t interested in, because it’s a step toward getting to their goals. That “getting it out of the way” that “accomplishing a step toward a goal” makes most people feel good. It’s enough to make motivation happen.

Motivation to me seems like: you wake up in the morning and you have a vision in your head of doing or being something and it makes you get right up and get to work on it. You don’t think about it much, you don’t measure your desire for it, you just get to it. If you don’t have a specific thing to work on right then, then you get to planning the next stage of what you want, letting yourself get excited over your goal.

I wake up, sometimes in the morning, often, not, and spend a lot of time trying to talk myself into getting up. I try to think about what I want to get done, what’s feasible that day, what I wrote down the night before for today, etc. Should I clean? Should I work out? Should I work on career things? Should I budget and pay bills? Should I do the work I promised other people I’d do? Should I respond to emails?

It’s maybe like testing solutions on litmus paper to see how acidic they are. I try out each option in my head to see which one gets a reaction from my heart. One or two may get tiny little lift of “maybe…” and a couple more will get an “oh shit, I gotta do that” Most will get jack. Silence. Even when I think “well this step will contribute to that goal that I really want” …squat.

The best I can say is the same feeling you might get when you have an assignment and the due date is in more than a month. Are you going to get to work on it today? Are you reeaally? Because most people I know tend to wait until the deadline “feels” real, and then they get in gear. When you don’t have a deadline on things, and it kind of doesn’t matter if you do it or not… or, more importantly, it doesn’t “feel” like it matters… it’s hard as hell to get the damn motivation going. I can’t seem to connect to the far out goals no matter what I do. I guess I want to have a real career? I suppose I would like to have good variety of friends? I wanna lose the flab but what is that really? What would I even look like?

I need the near term stuff to matter. What I can get done this week, today. But right now everything in front of me is repair work from having been disinterested for so long most of it just collapsed in on itself. And just observing that alone is crushing.

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Even the Goldfish Died

31 Saturday Dec 2016

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Damn this year, amirite? Just to get that out of the way – the major, macro level things were fairly crappy and damned near traumatic, weren’t they. David Bowie to Carrie Fisher, Prince, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Florence Henderson, Debbie Reynolds and on and on, even in geopolitics, Janet Reno and Fidel Castro, all trampled under this blind troll of a year.

And then there was an election that may yet have consigned us all to hell. I definitely feel like I’m in a hellmouth, being frog-marched toward the flames. After a year and change of being forced to listen to Donald Trump, I was looking forward to having him turn into an obnoxious footnote of history. I wanted so bad to forget this asshole by Nov 9, the garbage he had said, the mockery it made of a Presidential election. That he won the election – that he won despite his opponent receiving almost 3 million more individual votes – probably makes me the most sick out of all the major level disasters of this year.

If you’re wondering about the goldfish, well that’s the real point of this post. Trauma and tragedy extended into my personal life; and it’s been difficult to grapple with given the noise and fury of political and social losses.

My dad’s baby sister, my aunt Sister Virginia passed away in May. My dad is down to just one little sister, after growing up as the middle child of eleven. Sister Virginia was always a no-nonsense, organized and take-charge sort of person. The (gigantic) family hung together because she kept everyone’s phone numbers, mailing addresses, email addresses, and birthdays, weddings, baptisms, etc, together and knew how to reach *everybody*. What I didn’t realize because she was always bustling little bundle of energy in a Franciscan nun’s habit, was that she was always a bit anxious. And she kept the anxiety in check by helping other people, her family, the students of the school where she taught years ago, the elderly women of the convalescent home where she spent the last dozen years of her life working, and so on. When I was a child at family parties I didn’t find her very warm and sweet, but she was always moving, getting food and drink for her aged mother, singing or dancing, clapping for others as they sang or played guitar, looking after kids when they fell and scraped their knees, finding extra chairs for extra guests, and cleaning up when everything was over. Sister Virginia rarely sat down and never stayed sitting for long.

Lying sick in a hospital bed, racked with pain, Sister hated the family coming to see her. *Hated* it. And it finally sunk in then, that being in a position of helplessness was her worst nightmare. When I saw her the doctor was frustrated that she wouldn’t permit them to do more. From where she was, I was told, she’d have a week to live, maybe 10 days. She could extend that by several months if she agreed to further procedures. Well, the doctor was wrong. She passed away that night.

Losing Sister Virginia was a severe gut punch. But it wasn’t the only loss close to the family. My Uncle Frank – dad’s remaining little sister’s husband – passed away in the fall. And Ernestina Rivera, Tina, one of my parents’ oldest friends and a woman who had been in my life for as long as any family, passed as well. I’ll miss Tina and her wonderful cooking. Her husband, Hector, passed away last year. He had been a good friend to my dad for a good 50 years.

Of course, over the summer Paul Backer, one of my college professors, died suddenly.

And the goldfish? hehe- Well that’s part of some of the odder and less-horrible things that went on this year. Friends in Encino invited/asked me to stay in their house and take care of their goldfish while they went on vacation to Florida. The fish was the excuse, since I’ve cat- and dog-sat so much in recent years. They just meant to give me as much of a vacation as they could, and it was well appreciated. So, the fish itself. In my defense, the thing was a freak of nature. It lived a good six-ish years before kicking off. Just… did it have to do that when I was trying to look after it? At least I was warned it could happen, and furthermore instructed NOT to replace it. I can say this for it, it was the biggest won-at-fair goldfish I’d ever seen.

Other than that, I lizard-sat later in the summer at another house in the valley. 20 year old iguanas are fairly tough and only barely need some tending. So I fed him, avoided his claws, and relaxed in my friends’ house.

I don’t really feel like going through the year and the stuff I did. I can barely remember, honestly. But there were some really nice steps forward in the career and interesting artsy projects I worked on. I got into voice classes with some of my heroes – a workshop with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, Matt Mercer and James Arnold Taylor, a class led by Richard Horvitz – and received some really nice compliments as well as endlessly useful insight and instruction from them. I worked on a text and voice message-based alternate reality game (ARG) that was all about Shakespeare. And I landed a fairly hefty gig translating content from English to Spanish and then recording it at home for a real estate video designer. It took a couple months to get through it all, but hey for a while there I was a real, working voice over artist!!

Between working on that project and the class with Richard I felt more and more emboldened to call myself an actor – something I already was, but felt nervous saying out loud. So before I could talk myself out of it, I joined a theatre friend’s workshop and now I’m part of the cast. I’ll be onstage in WONDER CITY next month at Son of Semele’s Company Creation Festival.

I got to fit in some adventures with friends, too. I went to Wondercon, which was a lot of fun. I like getting to panels (I find the shopping really tedious, there’s rarely more than what I’d find at a local comic store (that I’d buy, anyway) and I have to dodge throngs of people, some of who are wearing large bulky costumes with spiky armor or ridiculous weapons poking out). But the most amazing part of cons is always the surprise encounters. And frankly, that’s usually with friends I haven’t seen in a long time. Thiiiis time though…img_10771

 

I met Edward James Olmos!!!!!!

And that’s one of the crazy things that can happen to LA. Meet an actor, strike up a conversation, get invited to a movie screening. Okay, that rarely happens – but now I can’t say it never happens!

Back to talking about the family, we also fit in some good times. A few months ago my cousins put together a 90th birthday party for their mom, Teresa. She is the widow of my dad’s oldest brother, Tony. They hired a mariachi band to come and sing her favorite songs, and 90 being just a number, my Tía Tere got up and danced over and over, and even grabbed my sleeve so I would dance with her! And just last night we had a 91st birthday party for my dad at his favorite restaurant – a Chinese all you can eat buffet. My mom and sister invited everyone they could think of, friends and family. I got to see people I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. We all hugged and delighted in seeing each other – for happy reasons. For many years we’d only see each other at funerals (again, my dad had nine siblings who’ve all passed away).

So, that’s how it goes. Tragedy and worries, deep concerns for the future, as well as continued efforts in the career, and really cultivating more boldness. It’s really scary. I can’t say anything without mentioning that. I’m full of doubt, and when I look around at the world around me, everyone is nervous of what the next year will bring. Will we lose equal rights and harassment protections? Will businesses be granted the latitude to treat human beings as mere resources to be scavenged? Will the environment be ravaged without an ounce of protection? Will unions be completely undermined? And on and on…

There’s this saying, “as above, so below,” and I’ve watched it be true in human institutions time and time again. If the leader of an institution is thoughtful and calm, the institution they lead will be thoughtful and calm. If the leader is rash and prideful, so will the people who follow them. If the leader is either mindbogglingly stupid or crass and cruel, I’ve watched institutions follow suit. The man who is about to be installed at the head of the government – at least at the head of the Executive – is a frightening mix of self-involvement, pettiness, greed, and superficiality. And he is surrounding himself with people have shown open disregard if not disgust for the responsibilities of a government toward the governed.

I hate that we have to face this at all, to say nothing of being without our heroes, the big men and women who shined so brightly we felt like we could find our way.

I felt this keenly when Sister Virginia died. Who was going to keep the family together? Who would organize the major parties and keep the phone trees up and running? Who would keep all the old photo albums and baptismal certificates? It’s still painful to think about.

But it was at her funeral that I realized we were going to have to step up now. That if the times made me anxious, I’d have to take a page out of Sister’s book and see how I could serve others. Getting stuff done, like she always did, really does calm the nerves. My heroes may be fading out, but it’s time for us to be heroes.

Resist movement toward the dark, be a beacon of light. Does it sound cheesy? How cheesy were you feeling at the end of Nov 8th? People are going to need help finding their way. You may be one of them–we’ll all take turns. We’ll need light. We can’t hope someone else will provide it. It’ll be difficult, it might be frightening. But it’s never the wrong time to the right thing. Sometimes the goldfish dies despite everything you could do, and sometimes you meet a movie star and he turns out to be cool, friendly guy.

Aging Angst

29 Thursday Dec 2016

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This coming year I turn 40.  It’s kind of terrifying and unhappy-making, even while older friends point and laugh and tell me I’m young yet.  I don’t feel 40.  In my heart I feel maybe 32.  I keep forgetting it’s the whole four-oh, and have to pointedly remind myself.  Reminding myself is what’s freaking me out, man, that I didn’t realize all the years gone by.

But anyway, I’m a-gonna turn 40.  When I was about to turn 30 I felt like I couldn’t wait.  My 20s felt weird, I wasn’t suited to them somehow. 30s seemed more established, like I wouldn’t be kidding myself if thought of myself as an adult.  Perception is such a weird thing.

Obviously, in retrospect this is all ridiculous (thank you, weird perception).  I felt weird in my 20s because I was largely wasting that time.  I had more energy, a faster metabolism, better health, to say nothing of holding down a steady job for most of that time.  I look back in chagrin thinking of the things I could have done – worked harder to get back into acting, studied Japanese, or even taken financial investment classes.  I try not to get caught up in regret or what-ifs because it’s completely pointless, but for all that I may feel young now, my body constantly reminds me that I’m not.  You don’t really need the gory details, suffice to say my health isn’t the product of misadventure or really bad luck so much anymore.

Still, one’s 20s are for banging around in the world and not fretting too much about bruises.  And I know this for I am old and wise now. So if you’re under 30 quit reading this and go have an adventure – before it’s too late!

I couldn’t see my future when I looked so hopefully at my 30s.  I was such an idiot.  I couldn’t see what would come either from my misfortunes or the misfortunes of the world that twined with mine (see banking collapse & Great Recession).  I couldn’t see how my forward movement would disappear, swallowed whole by depression that would take years to even think of escaping.

Maybe I want to be 32 so I can get those years back, goddammit.

But now, I’m headed into 40 and time and tide are not known for their patience.

I hope for 40 what I’ve always wanted from years previous – satisfying, lucrative work that I can be proud of.  Some other things too, I guess.  Good health, physical & mental, getting fit, not feeling like it’s extra complicated for me to get healthy thanks to being flat broke.  Getting to see friends regularly, not having to exhaust myself constantly just to see a few people once in a while.  Traveling would be extra nice.  Unlikely, but still.  But it really is all about the work, the career.  I have so little to speak of in that direction and regardless of what I “should” do with “shoulds”, DUDE, I should have a career by now.

You know, one nice thing that happened in 2016, though, was that I got a really nice voice over project over the summer. It was for a Spanish language video project that few people will see, but it was a nice payday (given the amount of work the pay was probably low, but no matter).  I got to attend a couple of classes with people I look up to in VO and they complimented me nicely, so that’s always really cool.

Finances got a little rocky though and I couldn’t get one major ticket item off my list, which was a Spanish language commercial demo.  I know I’m leery of it.  I know I drag my feet when I consider the tasks necessary for it, but it’s honestly a big deal.  If I can get it done I’ll open up a whole new area of work I can do.

So 2016 was looking pretty good for career stuff and at least by the end of October I had a lot to look forward to there.  It gave me the nerve to get into a theatre project and see it through to the point that now I’m part of an ensemble cast, and we’ll be putting on our show at the end of next month!  Now that is a big deal.  While voice acting IS acting, stage acting uses different muscles.  And I haven’t taken these muscles out for spin since I was in college.  Thanks to VO and thanks to working with generous artists I’ve come to a point where I’m more confident in my acting ability and have the nerve to think I can do a whole show outside of the protective confines of school.

For work that I love doing, 39 was not too bad.  Wasn’t great financially, all told, but there was forward movement.

I’d like to hope I’ll see more of it at 40 and beyond.  I keep hedging because there’s a lot of turmoil around me and I can feel the nervousness in the air.  Trying to get a job in a tense environment is *tough* to say the very least.  I’ve never been able to.  And other people’s nerves make me second guess myself.  All in all, one of the worst things that happened this year is casting a long, deep shadow over next year (and years to come).

What I fear for 40, I guess, is that I’ll have to push out harder and more persistently than I ever have.  In fact, I’ll have to get up with the conviction that I can meet my goals leading me there. And that is far harder than it sounds.  Not only am I prone to depression, but I can’t begin to figure out how to have a positive attitude and be upbeat about my opportunities when people around me are feeling morose, if not in a panic.  I can do steady, cover the basics, make sure the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.  But I can’t do hopeful. Not while everyone is telling me to worry about eroding rights, cut offs in access to medical care, runaway environmental destruction, and urban neglect.  I can’t disconnect what I do from what goes on in the world, or at least my country.

And that leads me to think that at 40 I’ll have to work on both levels, both for myself and for my society.  And here again, I wish I had the energy I had when I was 20.

I turn 40. In 2017.  Good Lord.

Anger is a Symptom

25 Wednesday May 2016

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I don’t know if I’ve ever read how angry depression can make a person.  I know when I was younger, maybe a dozen years ago, and working full time I could feel my rage build up inside me until I was utterly useless at my desk.  All of my energy was spent hiding how much I wanted to set everything on fire and/or throw it out the window.  I wasn’t violent by any means but I had to excuse myself from conversations lest I would whip around and start screaming in people’s faces about how stupid they were, how the things they talked about were so insanely petty, how everything was bullshit….  Let’s just say it’s good that I don’t work there any more and most of that vague, pointless fury has quieted down to ennui.  I may not be able to hide how boring I find most the world, but it’s better than breathing fire on unsuspecting coworkers.

A lot of that anger was really something that I inspired against myself.  I hated my life and everything I was doing with it.  And today I still prickle with vexation at myself and what I’ve done so far, but I aim a lot of the anger squarely at my depression.  Because in recent history nothing has made me lose so much ground and so much time from my life as the lethargy and misery of depression.

I get angry at every day I feel myself lose motivation, every hour I spend napping when I wasn’t really tired, every minute I hang in indecision because I can’t get up any drive to just pick a direction.

And I get angry at the time spent too angry to move.

Maybe vague but potent anger feels better than vague, sucking grief.  I don’t know.  It blots out suicidal thoughts and gives me energy… for a time. It takes more energy though. When it’s burned out I’m back to miserable.

No one talks about this.  I don’t know why.  Maybe people judge anger even worse than being sad all the time.

2015, the Godot Year

31 Thursday Dec 2015

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A lot of stopping and starting, but way more stopping.  Altogether waiting for something to give me a reason to move. I had to break things down even if that cost me time and effort.  It was an…

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Object Lesson

What came out of it was a lot of planning and finding the amount of items I could reasonably expect to get done in a day.  I didn’t get it all done, but I learned more about my work patterns.  They need to improve, but now I know what and how instead of giving myself a big general panic attack about needing to do everything with no idea where to start.

So I could get minimums met.  Okay, but one step beyond was tough, especially in any career capacity.

Got a mixed bag in the health area, as far as doctors are concerned. Shockingly low bad cholesterol and high good cholesterol.  But blood sugar is not so great. Pre-diabetic.  Must stick to my diet.  Started serious work on mental health.  I expect this is going to do/go forward a lot more in 2016.  Or *something* is going to happen.

I think I would chalk up a lot of the spots where I fell apart to effects of depression.  My inconsistency, my being so easily distracted, my lack of flexibility.  I did a lot of what I always do, sit around and stare at space (or get caught up in meaningless exchanges online), but now I have a record.  I know roughly which days I thought to myself, “get to work!” and just sat there.  I may as well have been saying “quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” to myself.

Creative fell apart in a lot of areas – obviously I didn’t blog very much.  But so much of what I want to do requires reaching out to other people, something I’m not very good at.  Any work that lets me keep my head down, nose in a book or poking at my laptop is perfect.  But if I need to email someone cold or introduce myself at an event… yikes.  So my dream of workshopping some immersive stuff didn’t come true.  But I still want to build on that immersive night I managed to have with a couple people.  It’s always a great conversation when I talk with people about it… now I want to play with it!

Paying work was rare, as usual, and it came from the oddest places.  I helped a friend organize her late father’s receipts ahead of tax time, I cat sat and dog sat and I helped mom with her school busy work.  Not particularly lucrative in any way, but it kept my head above water and gave me stuff to do.

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RIP Franny, who permitted me to care for her for a few weeks over the summer.  Cranky old lady.  }:>

I did land a fun VO project for a five minute animated piece.  The pay was small, but the reason to do it was getting the piece itself done.  It was very cute and hope I can share the completed project soon.  Obviously I want to do more VO work – for pay – but that’s all business hustle. Which I kinda fell down on this year.

What I’m also not very good at is working on multiple projects at once.  I gave a shot to shifting priorities on a week to week basis.  The “must get done on a daily basis” list was getting out of control.  Which is a major reason for needing to get disciplined about what I wanted to do on a daily basis, and even hourly.  I do and don’t want to count my scheduling system as something I did that worked.  I don’t because I’ve always been great at writing lists for myself.  Big deal.  The goal is to get stuff done.  But the scheduling system lets me know where I am every day, every week, and even a little bit every month.  I can see in detail what day was good and how two good days were almost inevitably followed by bad.

Also, April.  O.O  There is no info for April at all.  Barely any notes in my planner and NO tallies in my ledger.  At all.  I had to check Facebook to make sure I didn’t spend the month in a coma.  It didn’t sound like it was too rough – I went to WonderCon and it exhausted me, and then I was caught up in talking about and thinking about the Baltimore riots.  Also my niece’s softball team won their championship.  I suppose that’s all I did.  Weird.

In the end the tallies show a year that was slightly below C average.  (I developed a basis for grading how I met my expectations.)  June was excellent, and so was October, but August was abysmal.  I’m trying to keep my chin up about getting a handle on what _in specific_ I am and am not getting done.  But for this former A student, this is rough.

It’s better than I used to be but no where near where I really could be.  I’ve spent too much time waiting for my moment.

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Adventures in Voice Acting workout: I got to scream my head off playing Satsuki Kiriyuuin from KILL LA KILL.

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Workshop with Richard Horvitz

The thing about suicidal ideation and buying eggs

21 Friday Aug 2015

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When suicidal thoughts first popped into my head they were more like fantasies the way you might fantasize about pretty much anything as a teenager. Getting that boy/girl of your preference to notice you, winning a competition or just dreaming up the proper comeback to an insult from the day before. I don’t remember when it first popped into my head, and as someone who wrote bits of fiction for fun starting from a very young age I didn’t think anything about it, taking pills to never wake up was just another idea like the one about meeting the goddess Athena or time traveling to New York’s Gilded Age. I wrote little stories of people who just up and took their own lives for no particular reason. I saw the scene in my head and I wrote it down.

Suffering suicidal ideation and suffering from it are two different things. When you suffer something, you go through it but you’re not necessarily in agony. (I swear the phrase “suffer fools gladly” has been much abused.) You suffer traffic to get to work on time, you suffer your boss’s small talk before the metting starts, etc. But when you get sick the misery is expressed as “suffering FROM headache and fever.”

Suicidal ideation is probably the least miserable indication of depression I suffer. I’m so used to the thoughts playing like a montage of videos looping on the walls at the back of my mind I forget they’re A Thing. Everyone fantasizes, right? About sex, about winning the lottery, about beating a rival…I do that and have my death mixed in. I can lean into the fantasy like it’s anything else and really flesh out the details, or just leave it running in the back and give it as much attention as I give the hum of my laptop. What I can’t do is turn it off. I must suffer it to get to my conscious thoughts.

Well, you could always hang yourself!

Yeah, we found this rope! –Bad Idea Bears, Avenue Q

What I can’t stress enough to people who don’t suffer ideation is that I really don’t want to kill myself. I’m not fantasizing because that’s what I want to do – which, I realize, is the stark difference between dreaming of taking my life and dreaming of getting some action.

This is where the thing about buying eggs comes in. Say you have a shopping list in your mind and you’ve just been so freaking busy you haven’t had time to write it down. So you recite it to yourself over the course of the day so it doesn’t slip away that you need to go to the store. But every time you get to the line with eggs you think, “oh wait, my roommate just picked up some eggs last night so I don’t have to buy any eggs.” And you carry on with the list. But the next time you think about grocery shopping eggs are still on the list and you have to go through the whole recall that you don’t need to buy eggs all over again. This happens over and over and over until you start to get a little infuriated with yourself, but you’re already driving to the grocery store so you can’t write down the list for the pleasure of crossing off “eggs.” And then you’re shopping and you slow down at the section with eggs and all you can do is roll your eyes at yourself, maybe shake your head at your weird memory, and keep on shopping.

On the one hand it doesn’t feel like a big deal to me, particularly compared to days when I can’t get out of bed, feeling numb, feeling frozen or aimless, being unable to enjoy things everyone else loves or those really dark times when I’m not fantasizing. At those times I’m studying the fantasy, comparing it against a checklist I’ll call “Do I really want to do that? No? Why not?”

On the other hand the ideas are there ALL THE TIME. I am constantly on the verge of going shopping and constantly having to remind myself I don’t need eggs. CONSTANTLY. I think to myself, “okay what do I have to get done next?” and the answer is always something like, “go to the gym, read this book, fix the broken light, email the director, kill myself, fix a snack, check with my friend about when we’ll get lunch.”

See if you can find the item in the list that sticks out like eggs I don’t need to buy.

I’m constantly crossing it off when it pops up in my mental to-do list, but like the most persistent case of mood herpes it just won’t go away. It pops up more often when I’m feeling anxious and when I’m super stressed and frustrated the thoughts get more intense, until they crowd out other thoughts… And then when things go really pear-shaped I have very little energy left to keep crossing suicide off my to-do list.

I start to feel like I should buy the fucking eggs to get them off my list.

But I won’t.

Probably.

Saturday of Days

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

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I keep thinking today is Saturday.  It’s not, it’s actually a Tuesday.  But completely feels like a Saturday, the sun is shining, most of the family is home.  Some chores are being done, most are being ignored.  Meal times are whenever we get hungry.

It’s just that I’ve had work to do for the past several days (weeks) and must get back to it tomorrow.  But today I’ve had an open day with no plans.  Which means I’ve primarily been sleeping and then staring at my options, completely lost for what to pick next.  So I’ve gone back to bed a couple of times.  How is that not a Saturday?

If I were clever and/or ambitious I would take advantage of the downtime to really grab hold of my life the way otherwise made difficult by running on the treadmill of chores and work and daily nonsense.

There should be adventures and abstractions to tell you about, but I haven’t been up to writing lately, not even on Saturdays.  Maybe I’ve been busy (not so busy, I’ve watched quite a bit of TV lately), but more likely reporting on what’s in my head and around my life.  Is that good or bad?

Well, in truth no one cares.  No one really reads this thing so I could write any damned thing I wanted and it wouldn’t matter.  I wish I did have a bug to write more than on just the subject of writing.  This is the boring side of meta, I know because I like meta and this is boring.

In the end here I am not sure of how to explain myself.  It’s summer, school’s out and my mom and niece are home (a school teacher and student, respectively).  I just got back from a long cat sitting stint and will leave on another tomorrow. I’m lost and frustrated on all avenues of Things I Want to Get Done.  The house is a mess, the truck is falling apart and I have no idea what to do next in my career.  No Idea.

I guess Saturdays are for staring off into space and idly watching videos and eating a very late breakfast.  Even if it’s really a Tuesday.

Whiffing at Life

06 Monday Oct 2014

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I was thinking it’s been a while since I wrote on just my general state of affairs. Then I looked at my entries and realized I haven’t checked in at all.  There was some navel gazing, a bit of theatre and some silliness about loud music.  What in the world have I been up to, what have I seen and what have I learned?

Well, as it happens the year so far is best explained by the theatre I’ve worked on, yet highlighted by some voice adventures here and there.  As two posts from earlier this year show, I was the dramaturg for a one-act play called SEX & GOD by Linda McLean.  It was part of a night of one-acts we called “Woman Parts” since the other one-act was also by a woman and concerned with a world seen through women’s eyes and experiences.  When the show opened I changed roles to assist the stage manager.  It wasn’t how I would have preferred life to go; working on a production always eats up a great deal of my time and energy until I hardly have anything left to give to other priorities.  Furthermore, the pay is far from adequate so the only use for me was in making myself of service to my company.

I got far more out of stage managing our inaugural Solo Creation Festival this summer.  I was exposed to a much greater variety of characters – real, live ones – and for three weeks straight through I had to stay on the ball and flexible in order to make it all happen.  That was a brand new level of stage managing I don’t want to try again any time soon.  Exciting as it was, it was also exhausting and the time demanded from me left absolutely none for any other interest, project or job.

The best and greatest forays into voice over I’ve gotten this year happened before “Woman Parts” got very busy.  It was a mixed bag, auditioning via Voice123, beginning to attend the Voices Anonymous meetups, attending THE REELS, a workout group headed up Melique Berger, and lending my voice to a couple more walla sessions.  It was mixed because the highs were very affirming and fun (meeting and chatting with some of my heroes) and the lows have persistently regarded money and the frustrating feedback loop caused by lacking it.

I still haven’t made any money in VO, and I’m not spectacularly bothered by this.  It would be nice but I’m more preoccupied with getting my name known by more people and connecting with industry professionals so they know who I am and what I’m capable of.  However, my progress is hampered by not having money.  Without it I can’t take classes that are the best connection with pros, soliciting the advice of knowledgeable and successful actors, and, importantly, getting competitive home recording done.

Most of the time people new to the process are expected to have the cash to begin this career from non-acting work.  Well, of course I haven’t had a non-theatre job of any kind for years now.  Going back and getting one not only feels like a serious case of “taking my eye off the ball” but presents a number of huge obstacles all on its own.  I’ve effectively been out of the job market for years.  Explaining how stage managing skills might apply to a job in editing and proofreading is a very long walk that few employers are going to entertain.

So right now I’m trying not to give in to feeling too defeated.  Every one has rough patches and increasing one’s resourcefulness is just another task for a mature adult.  I do swing at opportunities when they show up – a part time gig writing facebook blurbs for a particular brand of tequila, another ASM gig – but I’m striking out at the moment.  I sure don’t take it to mean I’m bad at writing or stage managing.  Just…  I really could use the cash.  (Look at me not getting distracted by how weird it is to connect money with creative skills!  Oh wait, oops…)

The cash I was going to budget into the career has gone instead to fixing the truck as it has desperately needed some repairs this summer.  Absent those repairs I would be taking a few more classes before the year is out.  Instead I’m scrambling to grab opportunities to talk to pros without going further into debt.

In a way I’m still waiting to hit my stride this year and I keep stumbling.  Huge chunks of time have been given to projects that weren’t entirely mine and thanks to other circumstances I feel like I have little to show for it.  If I put so much work into a job and it can’t help me make headway in my career then what was the point?   So… that’s more or less why I haven’t written much.

But the beginning of the year really was pretty dang awesome.

Heroes 'n me

Heroes ‘n me

Rather Loud Music Sampler Pack Part 1: Industrial

21 Saturday Jun 2014

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A few days ago I got into a conversation with a friend about industrial music when he asked me more or less how to define the sound and what artistic themes run through it. I get the feeling that frequently people who don’t have a lot of familiarity with this rougher side of rock music tend to assume that Nine Inch Nails and maybe some of the louder rock groups (Metallica, Slipknot) can be filed under industrial. The problem is that while Nine Inch Nails (NIN) definitely includes sounds pioneered by industrial groups, thinking this is what constitutes industrial music skips the experimentation fundamental to the musical movement.

Before I go much further I want to qualify this and hopefully future posts. I want to offer some education on the different kinds of music found at this edge of the spectrum, but this is hardly exhaustive. I’m not an educated musicologist, really just a talkative fan with a lot of time on her hands. I’m offering only an introductory look and focusing on a very small sampling of what is available. Also, I’m a bit sloppy about nomenclature. I do want to explain the difference between industrial and heavy metal, but I see very little reason to expound on when and how industrial became post-industrial. So if you’re reading this wondering why I left out your favorite Industrial Records or Wax Trax! (RIP) group in favor of some major label upstart it’s just because this is meant to explain the artistic themes of the sound as a whole. I don’t want this to be a retrospective of industrial music and its offshoots, plenty of people have already done that and probably better than I could.

Now, having said that I should give respect where respect is due. The whole category began when the English group Throbbing Gristle needed to put out their music somehow and other labels had no idea what to do with their sound. So they started Industrial Records.

So, if you’re new to the idea of industrial music and you find this more or less unlistenable, know that Throbbing Gristle started doing their thing in 1975, when all this noise probably sounded louder and more confounding to ears used to the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. While the punk sound was starting to take root in the late 70s (which a lot of music’s gatekeepers also found completely unlistenable), the wall-to-wall noise that came from indistinguishable sources was almost less startling than the intentionally garbled vocals deliberately set in juxtaposition to any possible harmony the backing instruments might present.

Obsessively exploring the prurient and violent impulses in humanity didn’t start with Throbbing Gristle, of course. But they established the musical territory.

In a way, industrial was the sound of stagnation and decay in the midst of plenty. It came out of the First World, the Western side of Europe in the midst of the Cold War. The primary players were first out of England and soon also coming from West Germany (West Berlin, to be exact) and America (notably experimentalists Boyd Rice from San Diego and Frank Zappa from Los Angeles). Neo-futurism and fashion’s avant garde had gone by in the 1960s along with the explosion of rock n roll and the sexual revolution. What was left now was a bit of a hangover, not only socially, but economically as England suffered from recession and turmoil leading to underemployment.

The sense of fumbling around without direction, of losing ground economically and the only reprieve coming from vice may be recognizable to anyone who has been poor while living in a rich country. (ahem) Furthermore the theme of disconnectedness, whether from the natural world or from each other persists through industrial music, once noted as “industrial music for industrial people.”

For those who know the rudiments of industrial music, there is a distinctly Germanic feel to it. Something stompy-booted, with the precision of a well oiled machine. A large, grinding, brutal machine. Einstürzende Neubauten, for example, have been one of the standard bearers for industrial music for over 30 years. Their experiments had them building instruments out of scrap metal and intentionally organizing or sampling noise into harmonies that frequently mimic mechanical or technological sounds.

Even though they were formed in West Berlin, there was always something of the oppressive to them, a feeling that I find resonates with the Künstlerplakate of East Germany. Where often times West German artists felt overwhelmed by the race toward the future, as sold to them by various consumer products advertisers, East Germans typically struggled to express themselves free of censorship by government apparatchiks.

From the press release for the exhibit linked above: “Künstlerplakate function both as advertisements for cultural events and works of art in their own right, with most printed either by or in the presence of the artist. Limiting the editions to less than 100 copies, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists were, for the most part, able to bypass strict GDR censorship boards. While painting—with its associations of bourgeois conspicuous consumption―was discouraged by Communist officials, printmaking and graphic design―with their emphasis on reproducibility and visual communication―were encouraged. Artists’ posters thus provided a potent vehicle for individual expression and experimentation.“

On both sides of the Wall, however, artists challenged the mainstays and assumptions of art, knocking down rules wherever they encountered them, then writing new ones and knocking them down as well. In this way artists expressed themselves using otherwise limiting tools with an uncommon degree of freedom in an oppressive regime.

Band as Performance Group

The challenges to arts establishments have proceeded throughout the career of Einstürzende Neubauten. Early on they were sponsored by arts institutes and played in venues explicitly for the arts, such as for Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts’ 300th anniversary in 1992. Of course, Einstürzende Neubauten weren’t the first musical group that created live shows that looked like performance art – Throbbing Gristle came out of the performance group COUM Transmissions, after all.

Canada’s Skinny Puppy have cultivated a completely electronic sound and use audio samples extensively. Their stage shows favor horror themes with Nivek Ogre typically dumping stage blood on himself. Unlike shock rockers, whether Ozzy Osborne or Marilyn Manson, these performances aren’t with a wink to juvenile perversity but with a drive to investigate the danger and immediacy of life and instinct. Skinny Puppy have also been known for their politics on animal rights, drug use, torture and the environment and have consistently expressed these positions from the stage.

The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Ilya Kabakov, 1981-1988

Their musical M.O. reminds me of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the ideals behind bludgeoning the audience’s senses until the raw subconscious is exposed. Skinny Puppy have assembled their sound through heavy sampling from movies and audio tapes, distortion and “found sounds.” The music comes from such a variety of places it becomes like an aural mixed media piece of post-modern art.

Now it may be all well and good that there is noisy experimental music in the world. But what the heck can you do with it besides let it occupy your ears? Maybe, like any good art, there is nothing much you’re supposed to do with it, just let it reside in you. But hey, it’s music. Even if there’s no dancing to it, it’d be nice if you could at least nod your head and tap your toe to it, right?

The answer, my friend, is rivethead. Well okay, if you want to be picky, a Rivet Head is the person who dresses up in fancy vinyl gear and steel-toed boots on six inch platforms to go to a club and dance/stomp around to electro-industrial rock (or, depending on how picky you are, EBM (electronic body music)).

Former DJ Rudy Ratzinger of Munich began making his own music in 1991 under the name :wumpscut:. It quickly found a home in goth clubs that appealed to the sensibility for morbidity and decay. This eminently danceable music simply married techno with industrial; the samples are clean and layered but still favor minor keys and a threatening ambiance. :wumpscut: made industrial music slightly more accessible by fitting it to a somewhat more typical rock structure.

Ratzinger may have set aside some of the experimental aspects of industrial in order to smooth up the sound until it shone like form fitting PVC pants, but the end result is a crashing sound mixed with samples from horror movies, set to a hard pulsing beat. Just right for the clubset adrift in multiple media interfaces – watching movies on game consoles, listening to music streamed over computers and playing games on their smart phones.

…next time we’ll get into some prog rock.

Separated by a Common Language

18 Friday Apr 2014

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She says something to me and her face looks kind.  She’s trying to help me – us – though we didn’t seek it.  But I don’t quite understand and without realizing it I just smile and nod and back up a bit.  A companion is with me and he has the same cognitive disconnect.  She looks between us, polite smile fading, and says (perfectly clearly) in her lilting brogue, “do you not speak English?”

For that brief moment when I cannot speak English I feel keenly my alien-ness, the solid fact that we are lost in a foreign country.  But then other companions step up and assure her that we do speak English and she explains how to get back to the Water of Leith Shore.

Up to that point everything about being in the UK that was different was delightful – money with the queen on it, cars driving on the left side of the road, the legal drinking age, bobbies, haggis, lifts, knapsacks and hundreds – if not thousands – of years of human history under our feet.  For days we let ourselves think we were walking through a funny looking glass where things worked only slightly differently from what we were used to.

Now, no one will ever accuse me of looking Scottish (although my dad would be highly amused), but as a kid in Southern California I did go to the Highland Games and other Scottish cultural festivals in the area.  For heaven’s sake, when I was in high school we put on the Lerner & Lowe musical BRIGADOON.  My dad has a certain appreciation for the Scottish character and he used to tell me stories about the “Ladies from Hades,” Scottish regiments marching boldly into battle, bagpipes wailing.  Many of my classmates, neighbors and fellow church parishioners could have been taken for being of Scottish descent.

And so it was when I happened to tour the UK and ended up in a bank lobby trying to make sense of a bus map while it rained outside.

I’m now safely home in Southern California and hunting down tidbits of life in 20th century Scotland.  Overwhelmingly this is over the Internet because the questions I have don’t work in the vertical direction that books typically do, but at cross sections, threading different facts together to understand how religious, economic and social factors would affect a particular character in a time and place.  It’s difficult and at times incredibly frustrating because history tries to leave Scotland in the 19th century and insists that modern American history is all that I need to know about the 20th century.  Any other place should simply be considered as a variant to America….

Even as my research went along for the first chunk of considering the play I didn’t realize that that assumption was in the back of my mind.  I can separate out the much older history as a fascinating story of a people from long ago – Robert the Bruce and the Declaration of Arbroath – from modern life.  If an event is well in the past it belongs to people quite unlike me.  But the life that happens now, to people who look like my friends and who speak a language that (despite occasional difficulties) I speak as well, must therefore be somewhat similar to mine.  When that assumption proves unfounded and I can only take the facts as they present themselves, without orienting them relative to facts about myself and my world, it’s then that I feel I am really learning something new.

It’s the same feeling that I get when I really listen, very, very carefully to men talk about themselves.  But it’s only when they’re being as honest and vulnerable as they rarely get.  We understand machismo, we understand self-reliance…we’ve seen it every second of every day.  It’s as intrinsic to thinking “man” as it is to think “fellow wearing a plaid skirt” when we think “Scot.”  But when I finally have the insight to what might be under the bravado the point of view is disorienting to me, and therefore fascinating.

But it requires listening, really, really listening.  It takes removing every ounce of my own ego, every expectation that I might have to in order to hear what someone else is truly saying about his or her experiences, and not merely hear how their life might vary from mine.  I do love exploring people’s lives in other times and places.  I have a continual hunger to learn how other people do what they do, why and where they end up.  But I let myself think I know that we have enough in common; when that commonality is taken from me receiving a foreign culture and point of view is no longer reflexive assumption but an active observation.

It’s not a variation from the American lifestyle that today a child in Scotland has approximately the same chance of being born to an unwed mother as to a married one.  American births are only at a quarter unwed-to-wed mothers.  Maybe in another generation that will become 50%, but who knows really.  Scottish women aren’t living a variant of American priorities, they are making their own choices in their own society in a time known as “now.”

Linda McLean‘s play Sex & God is entirely concerned with women living their lives over the course of the 20th century in Glasgow, Scotland.  The details of their life and times are intrinsic and barely worth the mention as they proceed through their experiences…and yet it’s those prosaic details that make their lives so different from what I know.  We know the proud, strong Scotsmen, we know the tartans and bagpipes, we may know the factories and mines, the economic difficulties… but we don’t necessarily know how the women lived.  How it affected how they loved and what work they did, we don’t know their internal lives, their thoughts, their spirituality, their motivations.

So it is that my mind is turned again to this far away land that has people much like you and me living their daily lives.  And so it is I feel like I’m relearning how to speak English.

Sex & God plays with Lamentations of the Pelvis for an evening of theatre called WOMAN PARTS.  Opens at Son of Semele Ensemble on Saturday 26 April, running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and some Mondays.